Boston Calling
Personal · Product Design · Mobile App
Figma · Illustrator · Photoshop · Premiere
OVERVIEW
Boston Calling is an annual music festival that lasts for 3 days within the Boston region. With different artists playing on different days and stage locations, it can become frustrating for users to try to locate their favorite artists.With a newly designed Boston Calling app, users can customize their own schedules and view locations of different artists or venues to improve their experience at Boston Calling.
GOALS
Redesign the Boston Calling app to allow users a better understanding of their showtimes and available attractions at the festival.
CHALLENGE
Creating a digestible schedule with 3 different informational components while allowing the freedom of customization for users.
RESEARCH
After researching, many users complained about the clunky and confusing app layout. It starts off with a lot of different buttons on the home page that felt a bit overwhelming and repetitive (ex: it had the schedule screen as button on the home page and a tab in the navigation bar)
When looking for artists and showtimes, it felt unintuitive as you had to scroll horizontally to view different showtimes, locations, and days of each artist you were interested in. Many of the reviews by users were complaints on random ads being implemented within the schedule timeline itself, which felt a bit jarring.
In terms of navigating the festival, the map feature displays the location poorly as it is simply a screenshot placed onto a google maps location. When moving the map around, the legend is stuck in one place, which forces the user to scroll back and forth between the map and key.
As someone with allergies, it was also difficult to get a grasp as to what food options were available. The food vendors would often display their name, and occasionally have a brief sentence or two about the style of food they serve. But there was no menu shown or dietary information for any of the food vendors available.
PLANNING
I began to sketch out a few thumbnails to get a feel for what pages would become the main screens. From this, I created an information architecture and site map of the soon-to-be newly designed Boston Calling app.
Once the preliminaries were flushed out a bit more, I progressed forward with some wireframes to have a better idea on layout for each screen. Eventually, I was able to create an initial draft based on the wireframes I designed, but am unfortunately unable to test these screens without a feedback group.
If I had the capability, I would love to create a series of feedback sessions where I’d ask participants to complete follow tasks and gather insight on their speed, comprehension (or confusion!), and how they may intuitively navigate each main screen. I would then revise and redesign multiple versions of the Boston Calling app based on feedback received each session. A few of the follow tasks would include: add an artist playing on Sunday under the Hip-Hop genre, share your schedule with three friends, find the cheapest American food vendor and add them to your favorites, and find where all stages are located.
RESULTS & TAKEAWAY
This project took many months and was one of the more challenge projects I have done. It required many hours of critical thinking and problem solving; primarily with a focus on . After months of work and competitive research, I designed an app with a primary focus on the scheduling feature. Previously, the scheduling page was clunky, required lots of scrolling, and a bit difficult to understand where each artist was performing.
With this new design, I focused on highlighting each artist, who they are, what type of music they’re playing, and where users can locate them. Keeping in mind that many shows overlap, I wanted to also highlight the artist’s Spotify as a means for users to listen remotely to their music and support them outside of the festival.
As a secondary focus, I wanted to provide information for the food vendors. I personally have food allergies, and am to be financially responsible. It was rather frustrating not getting a single description of the food that would be available in the original app. To combat this, I created a more detailed explore page that would allow users to view price ranges, dietary information, and filter options for dietary restrictions. Each food item sold also contains an icon if it contains fish, seafood, nuts, or is vegetarian, vegan, or gluten-free.
If more time was available, I would’ve loved to have the navigation as my tertiary focus and create an engaging map that allows users to easily view different food vendors, stage-locations, bars, restrooms, exits, safe-zones, and more. The goal would be to create a dynamic map that has icons that move when the user scrolls, as well as a detailed bar when a user selects different icons to describe what the location is.
If I had the ability to, I’d love to test users on a variety of tasks such as; find 3 Indie artists and add them to your schedule, locate one hip-hop artist on Saturday and find their Spotify, share your schedule with a friend in your contacts, locate where the four stages are on the map, and find a vegetarian item within one food venue. Afterwards, I’d want to understand their own personal pain-points within the app, what they were able to comprehend, and any features that they might’ve missed or overlooked.
Without user testing, I won’t truly know for certain if I was able to create an interface with digestible information. But, I have hope that one day I can develop this app and allow users to test it publicly or collaborate with the Boston Calling team to decrease the pain points that many users run into.
